Sr. Data Engineer

About this role

<p><strong>Company Description</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Third Wave Automation is a rapidly growing startup that has demonstrated its core technology components, proven its market fit, and just closed its Series C funding. If you are excited about cutting edge machine learning, robotics that affects the real world, and want to join a company where your skills can have a huge impact, you’ll fit right in.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Third Wave Automation is applying modern machine learning to materials handling—delivering site-specific forklift navigation and infrastructure-free pallet handling that continuously adapts to changing floor configuration and warehouse demand.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><strong>Job Description</strong></p> <p><strong>Most data roles are about maintaining what already exists. This isn’t one of them.</strong></p> <p>As our dedicated Data Engineer, you aren't just joining a team; you are the architect of our data truth. We operate autonomous products in complex, unpredictable customer environments. This generates "messy" real-world data that defies standard templates. We need a skeptic and a creator—someone who looks at a dashboard and asks, "What are we missing?" and then builds the model to find it.</p> <p><strong>How You Can Make an Impact</strong></p> <p>You will have the autonomy to tear down existing models and build new ways to measure the performance of our autonomous fleet products in the real world.</p> <ul> <li><strong>Challenge the Status Quo:</strong> Audit and evolve our organizational KPIs. If a metric isn't driving a decision, you’ll be the one to kill it and propose a better way to measure success.</li> <li><strong>Deep-Dive Discovery: </strong>Go beyond the surface. Perform deep-dive exploratory analysis to find the "hidden" signals in our autonomous product data that others might overlook.</li> <li><strong>Model Innovation:</strong> Design and implement novel data models that don't just track what happened, but leverage simulation models to predict what will happen next in our customer environments.</li> <li><strong>Architecture Influence:</strong> Influence the design and support the documentation of the overall data structures to support the evolving needs of the organization.</li> </ul> <p><strong>What You'll Do (Your First 90 Days and Beyond)</strong>&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li><strong>Engineer the Pipeline:</strong> Provide critical feedback on our data ingestion pipelines and validate the data sources used for performance reporting.</li> <li><strong>Partner for Growth:</strong> Build strong partnerships with Engineering and Product teams to inform solution requirements and influence the roadmap based on your findings.</li> <li><strong>Empower Customers:</strong> Work with our Customer Success team to provide tools and reporting that give our customers a clear view into the value we provide.</li> <li><strong>Visualize the Future:</strong> Create compelling visualizations for both internal and external consumption that translate complex data clusters into a clear narrative.</li> <li><strong>Scale with an AI-First Mindset:</strong> Champion the use of generative AI tools (e.g., Gemini, Cursor) to automate the mundane and generate quality insights</li> </ul> <p><strong>Qualifications</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>First-Principles Thinking:</strong> You should be more interested in the "why" than the "how" and have a demonstrated ability to think from the ground up.</li> <li><strong>Statistical Fluency: </strong>7+ years of experience using advanced statistical techniques to analyze custom, non-linear data sets.</li> <li><strong>Technical Mastery: </strong>Proficiency in SQL, Python, or Javascript, with deep experience in data warehouses and analytics tools (BigQuery, Looker, GrafanaBigTable preferred).</li> <li><strong>Database Architect Mindset:</strong> Technical proficiency in database design development, data models, and techniques for data mining and segmentation.</li> <li><strong>AI-Enabled Scale:</strong> Beyond traditional analysis, you have an appetite for deploying AI agents and automated workflows to expand our alerting surface area. You see AI not as a buzzword, but as a tool to bridge the gap between massive datasets and actionable insights.</li> <li><strong>Master Storyteller:</strong> Excellent presentation skills with the ability to influence executives and engineering leads by turning data into a compelling story.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Preferred&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Zero-to-One Experience:</strong> Proven track record of being the first data hire or building a data function from scratch in a startup environment. You know how to choose the right tech stack (BigQuery, Snowflake, dbt) without a pre-existing manual.</li> <li><strong>Domain Expertise in Physical Tech: </strong>Prior experience in Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, IoT, or Industrial Automation. You understand the unique pain points of "hardware-meeting-software" data (e.g., latency, sensor noise, edge cases).</li> <li><strong>The "Analytics Engineer" Layer:</strong> Deep experience with <strong>dbt (data build tool)</strong> or similar framework for transforming raw data into clean, documented, and tested modeling layers.</li> <li><strong>Product-Led Growth Mindset:</strong> Experience working directly with Product Managers to build <strong>Product-Led Growth (PLG)</strong> funnels or using data to influence product feature prioritization.</li> <li><strong>Advanced Statistical Modeling:</strong> Ability to go beyond descriptive statistics into predictive modeling (e.g., using Python/R for churn prediction, anomaly detection in robot performance, or regression analysis).</li> <li><strong>Visual Design Aesthetic:</strong> A high bar for "Data Design." You don't just build charts; you build intuitive, executive-ready interfaces that tell a story at a glance.</li> <li><strong>Cloud Architecture Literacy:</strong> Familiarity wi